So Big by Edna Ferber (read books for money .txt) 📕

She chattered, turned her head this way and that, exclaimed, questioned. Sometimes she wished that Pervus would respond more quickly to her mood. A gay, volatile creature, she frisked about him like a friendly bright-eyed terrier about a stolid, ponderous St. Bernard.

As they jogged along now she revealed magnificent plans that had been forming in her imagination during the past four weeks. It had not taken her four weeks⁠—or days⁠—to discover that this great broad-shouldered man she had married was a kindly creature, tender and good, but lacking any vestige of initiative, of spirit. She marvelled, sometimes, at the memory of his boldness in bidding for her lunch box that evening of the raffle. It seemed incredible now, though he frequently referred to it, wagging his head doggishly and grinning the broadly complacent grin of the conquering male. But he was, after all, a dull fellow, and there was in Selina a dash of fire, of wholesome wickedness, of adventure, that he never quite understood. For her flashes of flame he had a mingled feeling of uneasiness and pride.

In the manner of all young brides, Selina started bravely out to make her husband over. He was handsome, strong, gentle; slow, conservative, morose. She would make him keen, daring, successful, buoyant. Now, bumping down the Halsted road, she sketched some of her plans in large dashing strokes.

“Pervus, we must paint the house in October, before the frost sets in, and after the summer work is over. White would be nice, with green trimmings. Though perhaps white isn’t practical. Or maybe green with darker green trimmings. A lovely background for the hollyhocks.” (Those that she and Roelf had planted showed no signs of coming up.) “Then that west sixteen. We’ll drain it.”

“Yeh, drain,” Pervus muttered. “It’s clay land. Drain and you have got yet clay. Hard clay soil.”

Selina had the answer to that. “I know it. You’ve got to use tile drainage. And⁠—wait a minute⁠—humus. I know what humus is. It’s decayed vegetables. There’s always a pile by the side of the barn; and you’ve been using it on the quick land. All the west sixteen isn’t clay. Part of it’s muckland. All it needs is draining and manure. With potash, too, and phosphoric acid.”

Pervus laughed a great hearty laugh that Selina found surprisingly infuriating. He put one great brown hand patronizingly on her flushed cheek; pinched it gently.

“Don’t!” said Selina, and jerked her head away. It was the first time she had ever resented a caress from him.

Pervus laughed again. “Well, well, well! School teacher is a farmer now, huh? I bet even Widow Paarlenberg don’t know as much as my little farmer about”⁠—he exploded again⁠—“about this, now, potash and⁠—what kind of acid? Tell me, little Lina, from where did you learn all this about truck farming?”

“Out of a book,” Selina said, almost snappishly. “I sent to Chicago for it.”

“A book! A book!” He slapped his knee. “A vegetable farmer out of a book.”

“Why not! The man who wrote it knows more about vegetable farming than anybody in all High Prairie. He knows about new ways. You’re running the farm just the way your father ran it.”

“What was good enough for my father is good enough for me.”

“It isn’t!” cried Selina, “It isn’t! The book says clay loam is all right for cabbages, peas, and beans. It tells you how. It tells you how!” She was like a frantic little fly darting and pricking him on to accelerate the stolid sluggishness of his slow plodding gait.

Having begun, she plunged on. “We ought to have two horses to haul the wagon to market. It would save you hours of time that you could spend on the place. Two horses, and a new wagon, green and red, like Klaas Pool’s.”

Pervus stared straight ahead down the road between his horse’s ears much as Klaas Pool had done so maddeningly on Selina’s first ride on the Halsted road. “Fine talk. Fine talk.”

“It isn’t talk. It’s plans. You’ve got to plan.”

“Fine talk. Fine talk.”

“Oh!” Selina beat her knee with an impotent fist.

It was the nearest they had ever come to quarrelling. It would seem that Pervus had the best of the argument, for when two years had passed the west sixteen was still a boggy clay mass, and unprolific; and the old house stared out shabby and paintless, at the dense willows by the roadside.

They slept that night in one of the twenty-five-cent rooming houses. Rather, Pervus slept. The woman lay awake, listening to the city noises that had become strange in her ears; staring out into the purple-black oblong that was the open window, until that oblong became gray. She wept a little, perhaps. But in the morning Pervus might have noted (if he had been a man given to noting) that the fine jaw-line was set as determinedly as ever with an angle that spelled inevitably paint, drainage, humus, potash, phosphoric acid, and a horse team.

She rose before four with Pervus, glad to be out of the stuffy little room with its spotted and scaly green wall paper, its rickety bed and chair. They had a cup of coffee and a slice of bread in the eating house on the first floor. Selina waited while he tended the horse. The night-watchman had been paid another twenty-five cents for watching the wagonload through the night as it stood in a row with the hundreds of others in the Haymarket. It was scarcely dawn when the trading began. Selina, watching it from the wagon seat, thought that this was a ridiculously haphazard and perilous method of distributing the food for whose fruition Pervus had toiled with aching back and tired arms. But she said nothing.

She kept, perforce, to the house that first year, and the second. Pervus declared that his woman should never work in the fields as did many of the High Prairie wives and daughters. Of ready cash there was almost none. Pervus was hard put to it to pay Jan Steen his monthly wage